So this happened: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/video-game...-ghostcrawler/
I'm sure most of us have already seen it but just in case anyone missed it. Now before anyone says anything, I know WoW is not our game and that a lot of you hate it. I took this as a really good opportunity to see things from a designers point of view.
And I mean, come on. It's freakin' Ghostcrawler. Very few dev's have been at it as long as he has.
I listened to about 15 minutes of it and had to shut it off. There were a few things that really annoyed me.
The idea of players being upset when seeing another player because they're competing for tags or nodes... really? Maybe that should have been thought about seven years ago, instead of after Guild Wars 2 came out.
The stuff about dailies. I hated dailies in Rift and I know of and wouldn't have liked the dailies in WoW. Why? Because they're dailies. The dailies in Guild Wars 2 I can do anywhere, even WvW and still get them. I can do them on alts. They're easy to get if you're just playing. Sometimes you get them without even realizing you're close.
Guild Wars 1 had another solution to dailies, with regard to the Z-quests which changed every day. Sure they'd eventually repeat, but it was no big deal. The whole faction grind thing just annoys me no end.
But the big thing for me when he was talking about class balance and brought up that some professions people do more than others because they're more serious players, implying that the guys who play the other professions don't know as much. This is one of the very things that most bothers me about WoW.
You have an optimum class or an optimum spec and everyone that is in the know uses them, and everyone else if they're playing for fun, well they're not serious. They didn't crunch numbers. They didn't do the research.
You know, I don't WANT to do research to play a game. I did research for a living. Why would I want to do that in my down time? This is the big problem I have with WoW and games like it.
In Lagger's leaving post, he mentioned one of the things he didn't like about Guild Wars 2 was that he wasn't really able to say to someone, no that's not the right build or that's not the right profession and that somehow made the game worse for him.
That, to me, is one of Guild Wars 2's strongest selling points.
Yeah, I get what you mean, he's a dev and he has the best interest of the company and players in his heart. The problem is, the bigger the company, the more likely it will be controlled by business concerns over creative concerns. This is true in just about all businesses.
Actually, MMO's have been doing exp/mob/loot sharing longer than GW2. Much, much longer. And you have to remember, old game is old. They can't just flip a switch and say "Everything is shared now!" too many things would be affected by it.Originally Posted by Vayne
GW2 really didn't bring that many new things to the table. They just brought it to the eyes of the western player-base.
Also it's not about that specifically. It's about cross-realm-zones. Which is much different than the Overflow system GW2 put into place. It's designed to make less populated areas more populated. Unlike GW2 where almost every zone is dead without an overflow, which was only introduced to remove queue times.
Last edited by Fey; 12-05-2012 at 02:00 AM.
Regardless I'm not sure what I was supposed to get from watching this video. It doesn't change much for me.
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Regardless I'm not sure what I was supposed to get from watching this video. It doesn't change much for me.
Well that makes sense. You don't really seem to care about the perspective of designers and how aspects of games are managed, added, and handled. You only care about what you want out of a game, which is pretty much where the majority of players mentality lies. (There's obviously nothing wrong with that)
It's interesting to those of us who care about actual game design. Also it's really awesome that GameBreaker got an exclusive interview. Good job to them, they're growing into a pretty big deal.
You couldn't be more wrong about me. I do care about game design. That doesn't mean I agree with game design decisions. There are two problems here...the business problem and the creative problem And it exists in every industry with creativity.
The business drives the creativity because the creativity needs funding. I've run into this in publishing more often than I can count. By business doing the safe thing, they're also doing the stupid thing, because eventually it catches up with them, as in all the devs that copied WoW, when so many are tired of it. The same books over and over again means no new blood, means publishers are generally in the red, not the black. It's what makes Hollywood blockbusters so mundane. It's not good for the creativity.
You say I don't care about design. On the contrary. I care immensely about the design. I don't care for big business driving the car, without concern for the scenary or the route we take, though.
But ultimately the destination is what's important and your experiences at said destination. Not what you see along the way. Especially when that's where you're going to be spending the majority of your time at. At least when metaphorically speaking about MMO's and hitting max level.
Other games from other genres, the scenery is immensely important. Gaming is extremely creative and innovative (minus streamlined titles), MMO's just aren't.
Believe it or not I'm actually on your side with a lot of the things you say. But they're trivial matters. Until people start to feel the need for a better form of gaming then nothing will change. Because crappy games like Black Ops II make over $500 million in 24 hours. And that doesn't mean it's a bad game because of it's design, it's actually extremely well designed and it feels solid. But after all these years of the franchise growing, you're still just shooting people. Hating on dev's for making money off a successful market is kind of dumb.
It's like hating Twilight for being Twilight. I mean yeah it's terrible but for whatever reason highschool girls eat it up. Live and let live, as it were.
But Twilight isn't the only movie that came out that has vampires in it. Well that's a bad example. MMOs have a potential and I'd like to enjoy them and now I can. So I'm happy. I want to see the game do well because I want the genre to move, slowly in this direction. That's all I'm really saying. This game is far from perfect. It's got flaws up the yin yang. But it's still the best MMO I've ever played, hands down. It brings much of what I want to the table.
So I'm not really complaining as much as I used to. I'm only complaining about what it was, when people try to tell me how great it was. lol
I think GC is ok. I doubt he's really trying to upset any WoW-ers, but I don't really like where the game is going either.
I don't think I'll ever subscribe again unless they completely overhaul some things.
And that's what I've been trying to tell you. When MMO's first became a thing they were god-awful. I know you're aware of this even though you weren't around back then. They're actually really good now in comparison overall. Even the games that failed definitely weren't bad games, there was always some other reason that they died. The most common one of course, being the people trying to copy WoW. But that's always how gaming has been. We just hear about MMO's more than others because they take so long to build, cost so much money and players have to invest an obscene amount of time into them to get anywhere.
Dating back to the NES and SNES. There are only a handful of games from those days that the majority of people will even remember despite the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them were copying eachother just like MMO's do. This isn't a new thing, this is how gaming evolves. It's literally always been this way.
Anyone who can take a step back and look at the big picture of the grand scheme of things can easily identify that even if GW2 fails (which I obviously don't want to happen), but if it did. It wouldn't even matter. Because this has been happening ever since gaming first began. MMO's will continue to evolve regardless of failures.
Even Blizzard with their metaphorical throne atop their mountain of money, gold, and souls realizes that MMO's will continue to grow despite their current reign over the market. That's why they're making a new MMO despite the fact that WoW is already #1.
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